As Iraq prepares to inaugurate a new president, the mood is a mix of credulity and scepticism, writes Lara Marlowe in Baghdad
In theory, next Wednesday should be a day of celebration. Iraq is about to inaugurate its first post-Saddam president, a US-educated, Sunni Muslim tribal leader named Sheikh Ghazi Yawar who has sold telephones in Saudi Arabia for the past 20 years. Yawar has dual Iraqi and Saudi citizenship, and his wife and children have not yet returned to Iraq.
Instead of celebration, there is only dread. Some 300 Iraqis have been killed by car-bombs and street-fighting this month, about 100 of them on Thursday alone. In Baghdad, tension has not run this high since the run-up to the first anniversary of the fall of the regime on April 9th.
Under the new system, the prime minister, not the president, is meant to hold power. The office of prime minister has been given to Iyad Allawi, a secular Shia Muslim who trained as a neurologist in Britain, left the Ba'ath Party in the 1970s, survived an assassination attempt and was then paid by the CIA and MI6 to undermine Saddam's regime.
Allawi said the carnage in five different Iraqi cities last Thursday consisted of merely "isolated incidents" and promised to "crush the resistance." At the same time, he predicted the violence would grow worse.
One of Allawi's first acts in office is expected to be a declaration of martial law. Visas will be demanded of foreigners visiting Iraq, and a curfew decreed. The governor of Mosul has already established an 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew after five police commissariats were car-bombed there on Thursday. The Iraqi police and army, which are being beefed up by Allawi, will no longer need arrest warrants to detain suspects, and will have the right to shoot on sight.
Allawi was in charge of security in the outgoing governing council. His nomination is a triumph for the CIA and the US state department over the Pentagon, which backed his now- disgraced rival, Ahmed Chalabi.
The "new" interim government is led by four former members of the deeply unpopular governing council. It is to convene a national conference which will appoint a consultative assembly that will help prepare for elections in December or January, after which a transitional government will take over with the goal of drawing up a constitution, to be followed by a permanent government in January 2006.
But most Iraqis are asking whether the "complete sovereignty" promised by George W. Bush is merely occupation by another name. The recent resolution by the United Nations Security Council endorsed the handover of power, but the control of the multinational forces will remain under US command.Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander who was disgraced by the torture of Iraqi prisoners, is to be replaced by Gen George Casey.
The new acronyms being generated will create employment for those who make the laminated identity badges Americans wear around their necks in the "Green Zone". The US administrator, Paul Bremer, will leave on July 1st, with the US's former ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, stepping into Bremer's desert boots. Thousands of employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) will continue in their jobs, henceforth categorised as employees of the state department or of reconstruction organisation IRMO.
Perhaps most significant in Iraqi eyes, the Americans will keep Saddam's former presidential palace inside the "Green Zone". Instead of CPA headquarters, it will be called the US embassy. In the name of Iraqi sovereignty, Yawar asked that the palace be turned over to the new government. No way, the Americans said; they've installed Internet connections and valuable electronic equipment, and don't have a comparable building elsewhere.
A recent newspaper photograph of Yawar symbolised the situation for Iraqis. A US soldier towered behind the diminutive sheikh in his Arab robes. Allawi is also accompanied everywhere by US bodyguards.
"It just makes them more likely to be assassinated," says a cynical source in the CPA. "If they get killed, the Americans will find other puppets."
Two members of the governing council and two deputy ministers in the new government have been murdered.
At the Khasraji home, a middle-class villa in north-east Baghdad, Faiza, a 44-year-old housewife and mother of five, takes little interest in what the Bush administration calls the process of democratisation.
"Under Saddam, the government talked about everything except the misery we went through, so we're used to it," she says.
Khasraji has just returned from a condolences ceremony for the death of her best friend Amal's eldest son, Ali. Amal's husband had abandoned her and their three children, and Ali wanted to support the family by joining the army. He was one of 44 Iraqis killed by a suicide bomber at the Muthanna army base in Baghdad on June 17th.
"When Amal went to pick up his body, she said, 'I thank God he is in one piece. Other mothers found their sons with no head, or torn apart in the middle'," Khasraji recounts.
Jabar Khasraji, a businessman who represents a dormant German company in Baghdad, has hidden the new BMW he bought last year, for fear it will attract kidnappers. He tells the story of a colleague whose house was recently broken into by armed men.
"They called him by his nickname, Abu Hala," he says. "They said: 'We like your house; we want to live in it, but we are kind so we won't kill you. Pack your suitcases, take your family and leave.' When they were about to leave, the gunmen said: 'We changed our minds. Give us the suitcases and you can keep your house.' They knew he would pack the best things."
The family bursts into laughter over this Baghdad story.
"We know it's not funny," Faiza says. "We're laughing because the situation is so unbelievable. My husband is in the queue to be kidnapped. If you're a doctor or a merchant or you deal with foreigners . . . And they expect us to care about a new government?"
Iraqis show a strange mixture of credulity and scepticism. Faiza Khasraji believes the Americans set off the bomb that killed her friend's son. Yet she questions whether the photographs of sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib were authentic. There are widespread rumours that Israelis are buying up property in Iraq "just like they did in Palestine".
At the Omar Muktar Mosque in Yarmook district, Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Anizi tells me that Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and the CIA are behind the plague of car-bombings. As for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian with links to al-Qaeda, whom the US blames, Sheikh Abdel-Karim questions his very existence.
"The Americans spend millions on propaganda. You can do anything with digital cameras," he says, referring to videotapes of foreigners being beheaded by Zarqawi's group.
Shia clerics tend to support the new government in the hope that it might hold elections that would bring the Shia majority to power. Even Sheikh Moqtada Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army which has fought coalition forces in the south since April, has declared a tenuous ceasefire.
The Sunni Muslims remain the most rebellious group. Sheikh Abdel Karim, a Sunni, praises "the Resistance" in his weekly sermons. The incoming president Yawar and prime minister Allawi are off to a bad start, he says.
"Since they came back [from abroad], they've been living in palaces, isolated from the people, protected. They have not visited a single hospital," he says. By declaring martial law, he predicts, "Allawi will kill any chance of democracy". Yet at Friday prayers yesterday, Sheikh Abdel-Karim told 2,000 worshippers to "give the new government a chance to prove they want to rebuild our country". The admonition was all the more surprising because the sheikh was arrested by US forces for a week last November, when he was beaten so badly that he suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalised. He says dozens of religious leaders, both Sunniand Shia, have been treated the same way, a claim confirmed by a CPA source.
"Saddam's was a dark time, but no one ever put their boots on the head of a sheikh then," he adds.
From 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night, four Humvees and a GMC with smoked-glass windows park outside Sheikh Abdel-Karim's house.
"They are watching me," he says. "But they cannot silence me."
Sheikh Abdel Karim has little regard for the new government, but he reserves his deepest scorn for the Americans. "They are treating us like red Indians," he says. "They are killing our people, destroying our country, raping our women."
He claims he saw US soldiers set fire to an Islamic library last year. The accusation might once have seemed incredible. But since the scandal at Abu Ghraib, nothing seems too far-fetched.
"They blame a few soldiers for sexual abuse and torture, but what about the officers who like to watch it?" the sheikh asks. "What they have done at Abu Ghraib has made people hate America all over the world."
If there's the tiniest chance that the new government will succeed, it will have to act quickly to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis, by providing electricity (still 12 hours a day in Baghdad) and a modicum of security. And it will have to distance itself from the US.
Ghazi Yawar has made a few harmless statements about the need to end occupation, but Iyad Allawi has made it clear he wants US forces to stay. George W. Bush gave him the tainted gift of US presidential praise in an interview with RTÉ this week, saying: "I'm proud of this fellow, prime minister Allawi. He's strong and he's tough."
Ismail Zayer, a newspaper editor, believes it is possible for Iraqis to shake off American domination by peaceful means. Until May, he was paid by the Pentagon to edit Al-Sabah, the newspaper of the governing council. But when he said he wanted to make it an independent newspaper, Harris, the Pentagon contractor responsible for developing a public media sector in Iraq, said no.
Zayer walked out with his entire staff and founded New Sabah. Three weeks later, his driver and bodyguard were murdered. The men were handcuffed and taken away from Zayer's house by gunmen in a police car. Their bodies were found later that morning, shot in the back.
Zayer is close to both Yawar and Allawi, and says he expects a showdown between the new Iraqi government and the Pentagon. If the Americans don't terminate the Harris contract, he believes the government should tell the contractor it can't run the media on behalf of the Iraqi people.
There may be the odd tug-of-war between US authorities and the Iraqis they support, but the basic misunderstanding runs deeper.
"Bush says the US will not leave until Iraq is free," says a diplomat in Baghdad. "To the US, that means 'free of terrorists'. But Iraqis say they'll be free when there are no more Americans here, that terrorism is a product of the American presence. The incomprehension is total."